Laffoley at 90

Laffoley at 90

In honor of Paul Laffoley’s legacy, his Estate has gifted to the Peabody Essex Museum and the Phillips Library in Salem, Massachusetts, all of the artist’s original handwritten manuscripts (162 documents/2241 pages). In addition, to add to the architecture collection of the Museum, 78 architectural studies were also donated for reference and accessibility. We are very grateful for the invitation by the Peabody to secure Paul’s archive for study by future generations.

Paul would have turned 90 years old today. Shortly before his death in 2015, there was some discussion of placing him in a coma to provide the possibility of future study of his brain at Massachusetts General while he was in the Emergency Room. Laffoley was always “up” for the next thing, but we passed on the possibility. While frequently categorized as an “outsider”, Laffoley was a graduate of Brown University with honors in the classics, philosophy and art history. For his post-graduate studies, with an interest in the cartography of the mind, he was accepted into Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in avoidance of the trending “abstract expressionist” tendencies of the prevailing art schools. He flourished at Harvard but was summarily dismissed for his proposals which were outside of the adopted architectural trends of the day. From there, he sought out Frederick Kiesler with whom he apprenticed for a short while in 1962 before returning to Boston following the passing of his father.

His first exhibition was at Club 47 in Cambridge (1966). By 1969, while showing at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, his work was viewed by notables such as Timothy Leary and subsequently wisked off by the proprietor to the Woodstock Festival at Bethel to Paul’s surprise. He put on a seersucker suit, packed an attache and boarded a bus to retrieve his work only to find a tent had been erected to show his work at the Festival. This was followed by an exhibition at Boston’s Playboy Club in 1971 which was closed down in one day. By this time, Paul formally incorporated “The Boston Visionary Cell” which organized it first show entitled Proposals for a New England Center for Comparative Utopias. At the time, he also is a guest on a panel discussion with Paolo Solari. The second show organized by the Boston Visionary Cell was entitled The Atlantis Project, a floating island to study the concept of World Utopia. By 1976, he invents a new kind of gyroscope which he calls the Levogyre., and his architectural proposals are included in the book Unbuilt America. Laffoley remembers 1984 as being the best year for the BVC with the presentation of Goethe’s concept of the Urpflanze-the primordial plant from which all other plants derive.

Laffoley’s first institutional retrospective was at the Austin Museum of Art (1999) followed by major exhibitions at the Palais du Tokyo (2009), Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhoff (2011), Henry Art Gallery (2013), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2013) the Hayward Gallery (2014), and the deCordova Museum (2020).

His last painting, meant to be a part of a proposed cycle of eight paintings funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship was The Myth of the Zeitgeist: a tri-part investigation of time itself, or the form of a temporal “Dialectic of Necessity” known as “The Thesis,” “The Antithesis” and “The Synthesis.” This idea goes back to the thought of Plato and his postulate of “TheGreat Year.” This is the “Cosmic Year.” It is the interval of time that must elapse before the planetary bodies return to their original positions. Then all events begin again in complete exactitude – this is the theory of Eternal Recurrence.

Artist Page

https://kentfineart.net/artists/31-paul-laffoley/overview/